


there's no mountain too great

by Rehearsal_Dweller



Series: Give Us the Stars [1]
Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017), Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Gravity Falls!Ducktales AU, Parent Donald Duck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 06:32:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17761616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rehearsal_Dweller/pseuds/Rehearsal_Dweller
Summary: “What do you know about a Della Duck?” Webby asked, flipping the cover open to show Huey, Dewey, and Louie the nameplate inside:this journal is property of Della Filomena Duck.The boys looked at each other, then back to Webby. “Never heard of her.”





	there's no mountain too great

**Author's Note:**

> I currently have plans to revisit this AU, since this is just scraping the surface of the stories I want to tell, but it feels like a pretty solid start.  
> Comment if you'd like to see something specific in this AU!

“It’s almost done,” Scrooge said, his voice crackling from the poor cell signal.

Donald glanced into the living room, where his three nephews sat enthusiastically watching a hockey game. He ducked into his bedroom, kicking the door shut behind him. “How almost, Scrooge?”

“It’ll be done before the summer is,” replied Scrooge.

“We’ll be there.”

\--

“Where are we going, Dad?” Huey asked. He’d poked his head forward between the front seats of the car.

Donald pushed him back into his seat. “Don’t lean forward like that, your seatbelt can’t do its job.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Dewey, “ _where are we going?”_

“I told you, we’re going to visit my uncle,” Donald answered patiently.

“Who we’ve never met.” Louie sounded carefully and intentionally disinterested. Looking back when they stopped, Donald could see that he hadn’t even looked up from his phone, but he wasn’t scrolling. He, along with his brothers, was listening intently.

“I’m sure I’ve mentioned him before,” said Donald. He focused on the road and not on the two sets of eyes and three sets of ears trained on him. “He used to be a bit of an adventurer, but he retired to a small town in Oregon before you were born.”

“If he’s retired why haven’t we met him?” Dewey pushed on.

“He’s a bit of a recluse,” Donald invented. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, breathing deeply before launching into the story he and Scrooge had agreed on. “He’s missed a lot of your childhood, and he wants to reconnect.”

“Are you just doing this because Daisy broke up with you?” Louie asked faux-innocently.

“No, I’m not doing this beca – Daisy did not break up with me, we weren’t dating in the first place,” replied Donald. “I let Minnie babysit you too often.”

“Both of you did decide to leave the state within days of the last time you saw each other,” Huey pointed out. He held his Junior Woodchuck field journal forward so that Donald could see in his periphery a page from the “is Daisy Duck our Mom?” section, noting the last time he and Daisy had met up (to the boys’ knowledge) and when he and Daisy had separately announced plans to spend the summer out of state. Donald had to give Huey credit for his thoroughness, though his information was definitely incomplete.

“You’ve got to admit it’s a little suspicious,” agreed Dewey.

“Look, boys, we just need a vacation, don’t we?” Donald said, trying to refocus his very determined sons. “You’ve been asking me to take you somewhere for months.”

“Yeah, but we meant, like, Uncle Mickey’s theme park or something,” Louie said, “not the middle of nowhere in Oregon.”

“It’s going to be fun.” Donald cast around for other ways to get the boys on board with this plan. “Uncle Scrooge runs a little tourist trap, and his friend has a granddaughter about your age, he said she helps out in the shop sometimes.”

“A tourist trap?” Louie repeated skeptically.

“Yeah,” said Donald, beginning to regret the decision to tell his nephews where they were going ahead of time, “it’s a little museum of weird stuff he’s found around the world. Most of it’s made up, but – yeah, most of it’s made up. Take my word for it, okay, it’s pretty cool.”

None of the boys said anything for a long moment, and Donald shook his head.

“Trust me.”

Huey flopped back against his seat with a thud. “Okay.”

\--

The Mystery Shack was not much to look at.

Donald knew there was more to it than met the eye, but he really wished he didn’t have to be the one to tell the boys that it was their destination. It was definitely a step down from McDuck Mansion, where Scrooge had lived when Donald and his sister were children.

But a lot of things were different from when Donald and Della were children.

He parked the car around the back of the Shack, past the regular parking lot and next to a dull black sedan and a banged up golf cart. There was a small face peeking through the kitchen curtains, but it disappeared as soon as Donald made eye contact. That must be Webbigail then. She was a little bit older than the boys, and Donald had seen her a few times when she was an infant, before everything went south. Unfortunately, his family wasn’t the only one that had been affected by the fallout.

He sighed, looking back at the kids. Huey and Dewey were asleep, their heads touching. Louie was reading, and didn’t seem to have noticed that they’d stopped moving. “Lou, we’re here.”

“Ugh, finally,” said Louie, looking up at the building for a moment. “This his house? It looks like a wreck.”

“Hey, don’t judge till you’ve –“ Donald frowned, realizing this wasn’t going to work, “lived in it.”

“Pass.”

Donald threw the car door open. “Not an option.” He looked back at Louie, who was finally, _finally_ , looking back at him. “Look, I’m giving you boys free reign this summer – I know Gravity Falls, I know you’ll be safe here. Relatively, at least. Have some fun, make some friends. The woods around here are full of all kinds of cool things to explore. And if you hate it, we’re going back to Duckburg in three months and you can complain to all of your little friends about how annoying I am.”

“Ugh, fine, you’re not – wait did you say we can go wherever we want?” Louie said, gripping the edge of his seat tightly. “ _Dad_. Dad, are you messing with me?”

“I wouldn’t do that, Lou,” said Donald.

“I don’t know,” replied Louie, “you named me _Llewellyn.”_

“I didn’t –“ Donald squeezed his eyes shut. “I didn’t do that to mess with you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Louie started shoving and elbowing his brothers. “Guys! _Guys_! Wake up, you are never going to believe what Dad just told me!”

Shaking his head, Donald climbed out of the car and started collecting their bags to bring inside.

\--

Huey, Dewey, and Louie were no strangers to Getting Into Trouble. In fact, given their own temperaments and their father’s overprotective nature, you could even say that Getting Into Trouble and the Duck triplets were old friends. That said, they had never had the freedom that Dad had promised them in Gravity Falls, and there was all kinds of new Trouble that they could Get Into that they’d never even encountered before.

And all of that was before they met Webbigail “Webby” Vanderquack.

Webby burst into their lives with a shout and a grappling hook gun and sort of tried to kidnap them. They’d been standing outside the Mystery Shack trying to decide what to do with their day one minute, and the next they were hanging upside down in the Shack’s attic.

“Are you Hubert, Dewford, and Llewellyn Duck?” a girl’s voice asked from the shadows.

“ _Ugh_ ,” Louie whined instead of answering. “For the last _god damned time_ , my name is _Louie!_ Why is this so hard for you people to –“

“Huey, Dewey, and Louie Duck,” Huey corrected, surprisingly gently for a boy in his current situation. “We don’t really – the full names are a sore spot.”

They crashed to the ground. “Oh, I know all about that,” the girl said, stepping into the light. “My full name is Webbigail. Webby.”

“Do you have a hobby of stringing people up by their ankles in their families’ homes?” asked Dewey, straightening up and brushing himself off.

“Only when they can give me vital information to my lifelong cause of studying the McDuck family,” Webby said seriously.

“I don’t know if we can do that,” Huey replied. “We don’t even really know Grunkle Scrooge.”

“Pssh, I know pretty much everything there is to know about Scrooge McDuck,” said Webby, waving him off. “I want to know about Donald Duck! Your uncle is one of the greatest adventurers of all time, and you _live with him_!”

“Your sources must be faulty, sister, cause you’ve got this all wrong,” said Louie. “Donald Duck is our _dad_ , and he’s boring.”

“But –“ Webby started, frowning. “I thought – okay. If you say so.”

“We do,” the boys said in unison.

Webby crossed the room and pulled a beaten book from under the mattress of the bottom bunk. It was a dark pinkish red, worn around the edges and very dirty. She clutched it close to her chest until she was close to them again, when she hesitantly held it out to them. The front cover had a shiny golden airplane on it – it gave the impression that it might’ve been hand-drawn with a metallic ink, as it was a little shaky and uneven – with a great big 3 scrawled across it. The lower right corner had “DFD” written in the same hand but much smaller.

“What do you know about a _Della_ Duck?” Webby asked, flipping the cover open to show Huey, Dewey, and Louie the nameplate inside: _this journal is property of Della Filomena Duck._

The boys looked at each other, then back to Webby. “Never heard of her.”

\--

“- would turn their lives upside down,” Donald said. Dewey saw him put his face into his hands through the sliver of open door. “No, I’m not going to tell them. I don’t want them to feel abandoned.”

Dewey was raised well, and good manners told him it was very rude to listen in on conversations, but curiosity kept him glued to the wall.

“Don’t they already?” Scrooge’s voice responded. “You’re raising them alone.”

Donald laughed. “The boys think my friend Daisy – do you remember Daisy? – is their mother. And they know they’re loved and wanted. They don’t feel left behind.”

“And what will you do,” Mrs Beakley cut in, “if Della doesn’t give you a choice, Donald?”

“Cross that bridge when I come to it.”

Dewey gasped, but before he could be caught he’d already run off to the shop, where he knew Webby was working.

“Webs, I think you might be right.”

\--

Remarkably, Donald held true to his promise at the beginning of the summer to let the boys wander freely. No matter how many fantastic, impossible, mythical things they discovered during the day, no matter what state they came home in, Donald just patched them up and fed them dinner, no questions asked. They’d taken to adventuring during the day – Huey had dubbed it “mystery hunting” and his siblings the “mystery triplets (and Webby)” – using Della’s journal as a guide to Gravity Falls’s weirdness.

It had turned out to be a field journal, chronicling the owner’s time as a research assistant studying the town and its surrounding area. The kids used it mostly as a reference; if they found themselves facing something they didn’t know how to handle, they’d flip through the journal and hope they found something helpful.

That was how it took a few weeks before they found the first reference to “Uncle Scrooge.”

It was even longer before they found the offhand note about how “my dumb brother Donald didn’t believe me when I told him I finally found one of these! Good thing we caught them around again yesterday!”

 _That_ was the thing that finally refocused Louie (who’d been hoping to find something interesting for the Mystery Shack so that he could convince Grunkle Scrooge to leave it to him when he died) and Huey (who was in it for the academic love of discovery and a bid for the “discovering something that doesn’t exist” patch) onto Dewey and Webby’s quest for answers. Gravity Falls Founder’s Day gave them an excuse to dig through the town’s sad little library, in hopes of finding something Webby hadn’t seen before about the Duck-McDuck family.

“And you’re _sure_ he’s your dad?” Webby pushed.

“Why would he lie about that?” asked Huey, flipping the pages of his book.

“Why would he lie about a whole person?” Dewey said.

Louie was leaning his chair back on its back two legs, rocking it back and forth a little with the foot he was using for balance. “Dad doesn’t lie to us.”

Dewey pushed Della’s journal across the table to him. “This says he did.”

“Yeah, and we don’t even know who this _Della_ person really was,” said Louie, letting his chair fall flat with a _thunk_. “So her initials are the same as Dad’s, so she had a brother named Donald and an uncle named Scrooge, but if she _really was_ our dad’s sister, he decided not to tell us about her. His sister. Does that really sound like our dad?”

Dewey looked as if he was ready to speak again, angry, but Webby cut him off, speaking in a low voice.

“I found her.”

“What is it, Webs?” asked Huey, trying not to look at his brothers. She was holding a piece of newsprint which had the look of something that had once been crumpled up but had since been pressed flat again, with fine creases spiderwebbing across the whole page.

“ _ANNOUNCEMENT: Della Duck, niece of local businessman Scrooge McDuck, and fiancé_ – I can’t read the next part, it’s all smudgy – _expecting their first ducklings_ ,” Webby read. Dewey and Louie both turned to watch her read, settling a little. “ _The 3 eggs were laid in mid-March, and are expected to hatch within the next week. A duckling shower will be held on Saturday, April 10, in the home of Della’s brother Donald, hosted by their dear friend_ – ” Webby trailed off, staring down at the page in her hands. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, then looked up at Huey. “- _Letitia Vanderquack.”_

“Is that –“

“My mom.” Webby looked back at the page. “The rest is details about the party, all are welcome, stuff like that. I – this is from 2004. I hatched in September of 2003, but I didn’t know I lived in Gravity Falls before I moved in with Granny when my parents died.”

“Wait a second, you’re older than us?” Louie interjected.

Huey waved him off. “ _We_ hatched April 2004. I think this is our confirmation that Dad was – was maybe not honest with us.”

\--

“Hey, dad? Do you know anything about somebody named Della Duck?”

“Where did you hear that name, Lou?”

“It was on a family tree we found during our founder’s day research,” Louie lied easily, “next to _yours_. We were just wondering who she was.”

Donald shook his head. “She’s gone. Don’t ask about her again.”

\--

The summer passed in a blur of adventures, mysteries, and demonic possessions.

You know, normal kid stuff.

Donald barely noticed any of it. He spent most of his days shouldering the ‘Mr Mystery’ gig for Uncle Scrooge, so that Scrooge himself could disappear back into the basement lab the kids didn’t know about to work on their _project._ All the while, he wondered what Dell had been up to all this time, if she really was still out there somewhere. He thought, as he’d thought for the last 13 years, about what he’d say if they could bring her back.

He never expected that the kids would (kind of) figure out what they were up to.

He never expected that they’d try to _stop them_.

Sure, the portal was dangerous. Donald, Scrooge, and Bentina knew that better than anyone. God only knew how the kids found out, but here they were.

Donald’s sons stood between him and the only chance in hell he had of seeing his sister again. Gravity was fluctuating, different pockets of the room left people floating or dragged them down to the ground and it was almost impossible to move in a predictable or reliable way. There was no way to get to the kids, to pull them away from danger. After everything, Donald couldn’t lose them too.

Maybe they were right, maybe this was one of those things that they shouldn’t have messed with. It was too late to go back now, though.

It was far, far too late.

The portal was partway through its activation sequence, and Dewey had crawled toward the emergency stop. He was the closest to the portal – closer by feet than his brothers and Webbigail, by yards than the adults. He looked back at Donald, betrayal and anger burning in his eyes.

“What are you waiting for?” Huey shouted from somewhere near the ceiling, where he was clinging to some wiring in case of another gravity shift.

“Press the damn button!” Louie agreed, pressed down flat on his stomach by the east wall.

“Just one more minute!” Scrooge called desperately. “ _Please_ , just give it one more minute!”

“Dewey, come on!” said Webby, who despite the forces working against her was still trying to work her way toward him.

Dewey’s hand inched closer to the button.

Bentina tried, too. “It will deactivate on its own after –“

“After what?” Dewey yelled back. “Why should I believe anything you guys say anymore?”

Donald pushed forward, fully focused on Dewey. “I’m _sorry_ , Dew! There are things I haven’t told you boys – things I should have told you. It’s too late to change any of that now.” He sighed, tears forming in his eyes. “But I promise that this will be okay. And after this ends, I’ll explain everything. And if you kids hate me -“ He looked from Dewey, to Huey, to Louie, to Webby, then back to Dewey. “ – If you kids hate me, that’s okay. I probably deserve it.”

Dewey was crying, too.

“Everything I’ve done this summer,” Donald continued, “I’ve done for our family. Everything _we’ve_ done –“ he gestured to Scrooge and Bentina “– it’s all been for you. I love you, sons. Please, just – wait a little longer.”

And Dewey –

 

Dewey let go. He floated upward from the button.

“What are you _doing?”_ Louie and Huey shouted in dissonant near-unison.

“Dad, I – I trust you,” said Dewey.

The portal burst into vibrant blue light, so intense it hurt to look at it. And then, just as quickly as it had come, it was gone. Everything crashed back to earth. Donald could hear the pained groans of the kids – for a long moment he lay still trying to pick out each distinct voice. He blinked a few times, trying to clear the image of the portal that was burned onto his eyes. As his vision started to clear, Donald’s eyes fell on a shadowy figure standing just in front of the (now burned-out) portal.

As they came into focus, Donald could make out their weathered brown jacket, tattered scarf, and long blonde hair before the unmistakable face of –

“ _Della_ ,” he breathed.

“Donnie?”


End file.
